you shall reap
I wish to respond to Farid Esack’s condemnation of Judge John Foxcroft’s ruling against Allan Boesak (“Used and discarded like a condom”, March 26 to April 1). As a religious teacher and gender commissioner whose primary concern should be with establishing the rule of law and morality in a country where crime is the order of the day, he sets worrying precedents.
Esack knows he is treading on dangerous ground, hence he seeks conscious justifications for illogical arguments. His basic argument is, given Boesak’s stature and the horrors of apartheid, Boesak’s crime pales into insignificance, hence he should not have been sentenced. And what right has this judge of yesteryear to judge our inimitable cleric?
Boesak has been condemned by many as yet another senior African National Congress official found guilty of theft and fraud. More seriously, a point missed by many, the man is a highly trained theologian and dominee, who strayed from his calling through his lust for power, money and women, in that order.
Ironically, his conviction coincides with that of the president of the Baptist church in the United States who was found guilty of fraud of enormous proportions. The difference, however, is that the Baptist president publicly apologised to his wife, children, church and nation for his misdemeanours. There was not one iota of remorse and repentance in the fibre of Boesak’s being.
The tragedy about Boesak is that his attraction to Mammon made him forget that his talents lay elsewhere. And a gifted theologian he was. As chaplain of the University of the Western Cape in the 1980s, he never lacked an audience. I, too, was astounded at his polished enunciation of one of the complex utterances of Jesus: “I come to bring a sword, not peace.” The man is, therefore, to be pitied, for, like a Shakespearean tragedy, his fall has been occasioned by his lust for power, regardless of all his other talents.
It was clear to many in the struggle that his intoxication with his meteoric rise to power would be the seed of his destruction. If he “felt called to be an instrument in the hands of God”, why did he succumb to the temptations of this world? To be called and to feel used are different things, and reflect Esack’s muddled thinking. Boesak cannot be a victim while also wanting to be an instrument.
While his oratory skills and courage were undoubted, Boesak also engineered his own leadership and his own detention in ways that kept many dinner conversations going. There was a way in which apartheid forced greatness on all of us, and Boesak’s ego was ready bait for this. Why this sudden emphasis on his exceptional leadership when many of his friends gossiped endlessly about his newfound opulence, his self- conscious vanities and his affairs?
As a humble cleric, with a sudden rise to fame and easy access to funds, he sowed the seeds of his downfall by submitting to pleasures of the flesh. And for this he is solely to blame. Beyers Naude, Desmond Tutu, Cosmos Desmond, Paul Verryn and many other struggle priests did not let the side down.
Boesak was indeed called, but refused to listen, unlike Tutu, who, regardless of whatever situation he found himself in, stuck to his calling. While Tutu can be criticised for often failing to distinguish between his role as a secular head of a state institution such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and as a priest, he should be respected and lauded for never reneging on his calling. Boesak strayed and refuses to take responsibility for his actions. What’s more, he gets support from key people in society whose rise to power have equally blinded them to what is right and what is wrong.
Boesak deserved the sentence meted out to him because he stole from the poor to enrich himself. Analogies with the sentence meted out to Angelina Zwane’s killer are opportunistic at best. When Freddie Steenkamp was jailed for six years for a similar offence, there was not a peep of support from politicians and sympathisers. No, because he was the skelm, not Boesak, and he was responsible for Boesak’s downfall.
But now that Judge Foxcroft has proven otherwise, the analogy is expediently used in the media to urge the transformation of the judiciary. So the judge becomes the villain, and is implied to be racist, an instrument of the untransformed judiciary, a double entendre with sinister implications.
The judiciary is there precisely to guard against public pressure and mob justice. All who are found guilty of crime should be treated fairly, a basic tenet of the Constitution. Justice is no respecter of persons, and one’s struggle credentials should in no way exonerate one from the application of the law.
To suggest Boesak is the “fall guy” is to deny his own agency in his downfall. To link his sentence with Cassinga, Lusaka, Gaborone, Sharpeville, etcetera, and amnesty for murderers and political criminals, is to miss the point and blame the judiciary for the political compromise made at the World Trade Centre.
It is precisely because of the amnesty provision that it is incumbent upon us, especially human rights activists, to uphold the rule of law and to seek its enforcement equitably.
Esack fails dismally in trying to make a case for Boesak by invoking inappropriate analogies. In this exercise he deliberately suspends his logic for reasons that are understandable, but totally unacceptable.
Boesak is not the first great man who has fallen. The great king David also did, but he said, “Woe is me for I have sinned.”
Boesak seems to have forgotten Christ’s warning that what you sow you shall reap. Hopefully he will ruminate upon these words during his quiet times in prison. Or perhaps, by some stroke of political manoeuvring, incarceration might escape him too. This, I fear, is the intention of Esack’s article.
Rhoda Kadalie is a former Human Rights commissioner and United Democratic Front activist